The so called "Ten Commandments"
Fertile Memory
Mr. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was in London, May 10, 1983, to receive the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. The first winner of the Temptleton Prize was Mother Teresa, in 1972, and the winner in 1982 was the Reverend
Billy Graham. The address by Mr. Solzhenitsyn at that occasion was titled,
“
Men Have Forgotten God,” and in it he said:
. . . while I was still a child I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that have befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God: that's why all this has happened.’ . . . But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people. I could not put it more accurately that to repeat, ‘Men have forgotten God: that's why all this has happened.’
The consequences of remembering and forgetting . . .
We must remember. Memory is the fertile land where we were planted and have grown up. Remember our fathers and mothers, and their fathers and mothers. Remember the God of our ancestors. Remember six years of age, the first grade teacher, and remember the church of your childhood. Remember when you prayed. Do not forget God.You were unmindful . . . you forgot the God who gave you birth.
— Deuteronomy 32:18 (NRSV)
You have forgotten the LORD, your Maker, who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth. — Isaiah 51:13 (NRSV)
We don't want to admit that we're incapable of handling life's problems alone.
Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden.
In the middle of the 19th century Thoreau experienced living in the woods alone for "two years and two months." He wrote: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." One wants to listen to a man who has done that, and so listen to him again as he wrote about a sizable mistake we make:
We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and have forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself form this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low estate comfortable and the higher state to be forgotten.“Charles and John Wesley taught the first Methodist people that heaven was not just a future place of bliss but also a present reality. They reflected Jesus’ own understanding that the time is coming and is now present when person might worship God in Spirit and in truth (John 4:23)
“This is not to say that Christ will not come again to consummate the kingdom of God and establish it forever. The Bible does teach and the early Methodist believed it. The point to be made here is that heaven is the place where God is, rather that God being in that place where heaven is. Early Methodist could sing of ‘our heaven begun below,’ because they enjoyed a personal relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ by means of the Holy Spirit living within them.”
